Revealed: The Five Loopiest Guardian Articles of All Time

Polly Toynbee contemplates what a bunch of dumb monarchists the British are

What would I do in the morning without The Guardian to wake me up? Nothing gets the blood pumping around my enlarged heart like the latest dispatch from the padded cell that is the comment section – a place where wealth is vulgar, faith is sexist, the Union Jack is racist and bestiality is a private matter between you and your parakeet. Toby Young has drawn attention to Martin Kettle's crazy comparison of the British press to the National Rifle Association. Here are my candidates for the five loopiest Guardian thinkpieces:

A Dutch study published in 1987 found that a sample of boys in paedophilic relationships felt positively about them. And a major if still controversial 1998-2000 meta-study suggests … that such relationships, entered into voluntarily, are "nearly uncorrelated with undesirable outcomes".

Of course, dinosaur traditionalists like me would insist that a 60-year old going to bed with a 12-year old is in itself an "undesirable outcome". But, then, Right-wingers aren't the cleverest people…

2. Conservatives are morons.According to George Monbiot, scientists have established as an “empirical fact” that “conservatism thrives on low intelligence and poor information”. This is why conservatives are suckers for racism, homophobia, sexism, after all:

Prejudice tends not to arise directly from low intelligence but from the conservative ideologies to which people of low intelligence are drawn. Conservative ideology is the "critical pathway" from low intelligence to racism.

By contrast, reading the Guardian is the “critical pathway” towards snobbery and intellectual bigotry. Or so the experts say.

3. Communism wasn’t all bad. Yes, you might have been at daily risk of getting shot for wearing glasses – but at least your corpse was guaranteed a job for life. To quote Seumas Milne,

For all its brutalities and failures, communism in the Soviet Union, eastern Europe and elsewhere delivered rapid industrialisation, mass education, job security and huge advances in social and gender equality. It encompassed genuine idealism and commitment.

Now, if a journalist wrote that about Nazism, they’d rightly end up out of a job and living in a van down by the river.

The tyranny of the monarchy lies not in its residual temporal power but in its spiritual power. It subjugates the national imagination, infantilising us with false imaginings and a bogus heritage of our island story. For as long as they rule over us, we are obedient servants, worshipping an ermine-wrapped fantasy of Englishness. (Despite the kilts, the monarchy was never really British.)

It’s not terribly English, either Polly. But the Guardian doesn’t mind German dictators so long as they're members of the EU Commission.

The lack of western sources in North Korea has allowed the media to conjure up fantastic stories that enthrall readers but aren't grounded in hard fact. No attempt is made to see both sides of the Korean conflict: it is much easier and more palatable to a western audience to pigeonhole the DPRK as a dangerous maverick state ruled by a capricious dictator and South Korea as its long-suffering, patient neighbour.

Of course, the reason for the “lack of western sources in North Korea” is that it’s a dictatorship that controls the press. And the reason why we imperialist hacks tend to “pigeonhole the DPRK as a dangerous maverick state” is because it pushes drugs through its embassies, threatens to nuke the US, butchers its internal opposition and starves its people to death. But the upside – Mr Kettle – is that its journalists know their place.